Via Metal Miner Sources said that steel manufacturing entities in northern Europe are unlikely to seek price increases on hot rolled coil until July, despite events since May that could create conditions to raise them. “If you do that, you seem very opportunistic,” one source told MetalMiner. Mills were seeking €630-650 ($675-695) per metric ton EXW in late May, up from earlier quotes of €620-630 ($665-675) that month, though there are currently few takers. On May 31, the European Commission, the executive body of the European…

There are a great number of challenges standing between the current global energy landscape and decarbonization. Even though the installation of renewable energy production capacity is picking up speed, experts say that the growth rate is insufficient to achieve the goals set forth by the Paris Climate Agreement. However, in some places, the amount of renewable energy currently being produced is already too much for the grid to handle in some locations, with prices even going negative when supply and demand are severely mismatched. The problem…

The European Union is bracing for Hungary to take over the EU's rotating presidency, which starts on July 1. It could be an awkward six months for the EU leadership given that Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has been on a collision course with Brussels, watering down EU sanctions on Russia, preventing military and financial aid for Ukraine, and questioning Kyiv's EU aspirations. Hungary, a self-styled "illiberal democracy," has been penalized for what officials in Brussels see as backsliding on democracy, with the EU freezing 6 billion euros…

Electricity demand soared across the eastern and midwestern United States in June as an intense heatwave gripped the region. The Eastern Interconnection, which covers the mainland U.S. east of the Rockies excluding Texas, experienced unprecedented electricity consumption, according to the EIA. On June 21, peak demand reached 502,670 megawatts (MW) in a single hour, surpassing the 2023 June peak of 467,609 MW. The heatwave brought record-breaking temperatures to several areas. Bangor, Maine, hit 96 degrees on June 20, a record not seen since 1931.…

Electricity demand soared across the eastern and midwestern United States in June as an intense heatwave gripped the region. The Eastern Interconnection, which covers the mainland U.S. east of the Rockies excluding Texas, experienced unprecedented electricity consumption, according to the EIA. On June 21, peak demand reached 502,670 megawatts (MW) in a single hour, surpassing the 2023 June peak of 467,609 MW. The heatwave brought record-breaking temperatures to several areas. Bangor, Maine, hit 96 degrees on June 20, a record not seen since 1931.…

The U.S. Supreme Court overturned two staples of the regulatory system. the so-called Chevron deference, which calls upon the courts to defer to the expertise of specialized federal agencies and the use of administrative law judge opinions (Jarkesy decision.) Junking the Chevron deference would affect the work of a large swath of the federal regulatory bureaucracy. (We wrote about this case and its implications for OilPrice readers several months ago.) The court found that the considerable subject matter expertise of federal agencies would no longer…

Italian oil giant Eni is planning to divest over $4 billion in upstream assets, with Indonesia and Cyprus among those potentially targeted, Bloomberg reported on Monday, citing unnamed sources.  Eni is seeking to divest a total of 8 billion euros, or over $4 billion in upstream assets over the next three years, Bloomberg reported, with divestments potentially including both smaller projects that could be scooped up by local buyers, or stakes in larger projects.  Eni did not comment on the report for Bloomberg.  The Bloomberg report…

The Biden Administration’s new strict tailpipe emission standards have just become particularly vulnerable after the Supreme Court overturned last week a 40-year-old landmark ruling, known as the ‘Chevron deference’, which granted federal agencies the authority to interpret ambiguous laws. The precedent, set in 1984 in a case involving the oil giant, gave federal agencies more power to interpret ambiguous laws. But last Friday’s Supreme Court ruling will strip federal agencies, including the Environmental Protection…

The Trans Mountain pipeline delivered enough crude oil to load 20 tankers from Canada’s Pacific Coast in the first full month of operations of the expanded link, just below the company’s expectations, Reuters reported on Monday, citing data from tanker-tracking providers LSEG, Vortexa, and Kpler. The expanded Trans Mountain pipeline has tripled the capacity of the original pipeline to 890,000 barrels per day (bpd) from 300,000 bpd to carry crude from Alberta’s oil sands to British Columbia on the Pacific Coast. The higher…

A couple of years ago, private equity funds were having trouble convincing investors that there was still money to be made in oil and gas. At that time, everyone wanted in on the ESG game. Fast forward two years—private equity funds that stayed exposed to the oil and gas industry are making billions from their exits. At the end of last month, EnCap Investments sold its portfolio company XCL Resources to SM Energy and Northern Oil and Gas. The total price tag was about $2.5 billion. Also in June, EnCap sold assets of another…

The court officer who oversees the auction of Venezuela’s PDV Holding, the parent company of refiner Citgo Petroleum, has asked a Delaware court to postpone the hearing on the winning bids by two months until September 19, to have more time to evaluate the bids and negotiate a sales agreement. The deadline for submitting binding bids for Citgo’s parent company expired last month, while the deadline for completing the court-appointed auction and the awarding of the winners is currently July 15.    But Robert Pincus, the…

The court officer who oversees the auction of Venezuela’s PDV Holding, the parent company of refiner Citgo Petroleum, has asked a Delaware court to postpone the hearing on the winning bids by two months until September 19, to have more time to evaluate the bids and negotiate a sales agreement. The deadline for submitting binding bids for Citgo’s parent company expired last month, while the deadline for completing the court-appointed auction and the awarding of the winners is currently July 15.    But Robert Pincus, the…

The court officer who oversees the auction of Venezuela’s PDV Holding, the parent company of refiner Citgo Petroleum, has asked a Delaware court to postpone the hearing on the winning bids by two months until September 19, to have more time to evaluate the bids and negotiate a sales agreement. The deadline for submitting binding bids for Citgo’s parent company expired last month, while the deadline for completing the court-appointed auction and the awarding of the winners is currently July 15.    But Robert Pincus, the…

The court officer who oversees the auction of Venezuela’s PDV Holding, the parent company of refiner Citgo Petroleum, has asked a Delaware court to postpone the hearing on the winning bids by two months until September 19, to have more time to evaluate the bids and negotiate a sales agreement. The deadline for submitting binding bids for Citgo’s parent company expired last month, while the deadline for completing the court-appointed auction and the awarding of the winners is currently July 15.    But Robert Pincus, the…

As the world transitions away from fossil fuels to renewable alternatives, we are inevitably seeing cuts in oil and gas jobs around the globe. Meanwhile, the number of renewable energy jobs is increasing in line with capacity expansion. Many of those who have worked in oil and gas are ideal candidates for the clean energy sector as they have extensive experience working in energy, as well as the skills needed to support operations. Therefore, governments and the private energy sector must introduce mechanisms to make it easier for workers to switch…

Proponents of critical minerals as the way to have a world running solely on renewables and electric vehicles are not providing the full picture as their assessments of necessary investments and the speed of the energy transition sound unrealistic, according to OPEC Secretary General Haitham Al Ghais. Policymakers and forecasters, as well as advocates of a fast energy transition, need to carefully consider if the needed investments and volumes of critical minerals supply are feasible in their net-zero scenarios, Al Ghais wrote in an article published…

China didn’t include figures on utilization rates at power plants by source in its May monthly data series, following the previous month’s data that showed utilization at renewable energy generators had dropped, Reuters reported on Monday, citing China’s latest data release. In the data series through April 2024, China had given a breakdown of utilization rates at thermal, hydro, nuclear, solar, and wind power plants. The last such data has found that the average operating hours of wind and solar power generators fell, while…

For decades, the United States has been a net consumer of energy, using up more energy than it produces. However, a sharp increase in oil and gas production following the shale boom as well as the ongoing renewable energy revolution has helped change the energy trajectory over the past 15 years. And now the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) has reported that U.S. energy production exceeded consumption by record amounts in 2023.  According to the EIA, U.S. Energy production rose 4% to nearly 103 quadrillion British…

Mergers and acquisitions in the U.S. shale oil and gas space could lead to a decline in production, industry executives said in the latest edition of the Dallas Fed Energy Survey. The decline, according to survey respondents, would not be especially pronounced. Yet it would still be a reversal of a trend that most observers of the U.S. oil industry consider irreversible and consistent over the long term in the absence of constraining policies. Consolidation by E&P firms has curtailed investment in exploration. “Our hope is that…

By David Hollis of TruckersNews Operating expenses for trucking companies increased in 2023, according to the results of a new study released on Friday. The American Transportation Research Institute's 2024 Analysis of the Operational Costs of Trucking found the overall marginal costs of operating a truck hit $2.270 per mile in 2023, a new record high. While the increase was only 0.8 percent over the previous year, when surcharge-protected fuel costs are excluded, marginal costs rose 6.6 percent to $1.716 per mile, according to the study. ATRI's…